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Summary
Summary
A delightful history of Americans' obsession with advice -- from Poor Richard to Dr. Spock to Miss Manners
Americans, for all our talk of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, obsessively seek advice on matters large and small. Perhaps precisely because we believe in bettering ourselves and our circumstances in life, we ask for guidance constantly. And this has been true since our nation's earliest days: from the colonial era on, there have always been people eager to step up and offer advice, some of it lousy, some of it thoughtful, but all of it read and debated by generations of Americans.
Jessica Weisberg takes readers on a tour of the advice-givers who have made their names, and sometimes their fortunes, by telling Americans what to do. You probably don't want to follow all the advice they proffered. Eating graham crackers will not make you a better person, and wearing blue to work won't guarantee a promotion. But for all that has changed in American life, it's a comfort to know that our hang-ups, fears, and hopes have not. We've always loved seeking advice -- so long as it's anonymous, and as long as it's clear that we're not asking for ourselves; we're just asking for a friend.
Author Notes
Jessica Weisberg is an award-winning writer and producer. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker , New York Times , Harper's , and Atavist , among other publications, and been nominated for a National Magazine Award. She was a producer on the podcast Serial and runs the features unit at Vice News Tonight on HBO, for which she's been nominated for an Emmy. She lives in Brooklyn.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Self-help books may seem especially ubiquitous today, but as journalist Weisberg writes in her winning debut, the "American self-help empire has been sprawling aggressively for decades." She recounts the evolution of professional advice giving via 16 different practitioners spanning over three centuries, from late-17th-century London publisher John Dunton through 21st-century "life coach" Martha Beck. While cautioning that some of the advice discussed is "extreme, outdated, or downright insane" (such as 19th-century diet guru William Alcott's strict no-tomatoes rule), Weisberg stresses that her subjects were essentially well-intentioned, and not charlatans or hypocrites. Intriguingly, the book highlights trends over time, including the emergence of secular advice givers from the late 17th to mid-19th century, the domination of the 20th by either self-styled "confidants" or credentialed experts, and the current trend of striking a balance between approachability and professionalism. Weisberg describes the distinctive traits of her book's subjects, such as Ben Franklin's use of pseudonyms, columnist Dorothy Dix's combination of sympathy with tough love, and astrologer Joan Quigley's direct line to the Reagan White House. Both those devoted to and bemused by self-help literature will profit from this insightful look into an ever-relevant and changing facet of American society. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A social history of and commentary on the extremely lucrative enterprise of dispensing advice.Realizing she cannot possibly deal with all, or even many, of three centuries' worth of professional advice-givers, Weisberg, formerly a producer of Serial as well as Vice News Tonight, narrows it down to a comfortable number and arranges her discussion chronologically. She begins and ends with commentary on Americans' fondness for obtaining advice from newspapers, books, conferences, and the internet and then takes us back to the late 17th century and John Dunton, whose Athenian Gazette debuted in London in March 1691. As the author writes, this periodical, which "delivered harsh and clear determinations of what was acceptable and what was not," was the beginning of it all. She then proceeds forward in fairly formulaic fashion: an introduction to each adviser, a bit of biography of the person, explorations of current practitioners who follow a similar approach, and comments about the strengths and failures of the techniques. Quite a few of the names will be familiar to general readers, including Benjamin Franklin, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Dale Carnegie, and Dear Abby. But Weisberg also focuses on less-well-known figures, including William Alcott and Joan Quigley, "Nancy Reagan's astrologer." The author is not afraid to deliver some zingers. She sees hypocrisy in Dr. Spock; marriage counselors Harville Hendrix and Helen Hunt are "old-fashioned"; Miss Manners (Judith Martin) is "a blend of a Jane Austen heroine and Anna Wintour." The most engaging chapters are those in which Weisberg participates in some fashion. She attends a Dale Carnegie workshop, interviews advisers, and brings personal perspective. She also provides plenty of historical nuggets, reminding us that Dear Abby and Ann Landers were estranged identical twins and that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross helped found the hospice movement. The tone is generally informative, though sometimes critical and even cynical.A swift account of an industry that bubbles with bluster and marinates in money.
Booklist Review
Why is it we bristle at advice from close relatives yet eagerly seek guidance from anonymous strangers (with sometimes dubious credentials)? This engaging, documented, and thoughtfully presented overview of advice givers begins in 1691, with British seers who dispersed counsel on various topics, and culminates with Quora, a user-sustained website where anyone can weigh in on queries. Along the way, readers meet a succession of self-proclaimed gurus, many addressing the complexities of love and relationships and others wading into morality, finance, self-improvement, parenting, astrological destiny, acceptance of death, life coaching, or nutrition (such as the Inuit diet of raw fish and caribou promoted in the 1920s). Some names should be familiar (Dear Abby, Miss Manners), while others may have faded from public memory (Dorothea Dix, Joan Quigley). Author Weisberg provides historical context that frames trending angsts within bygone eras, explaining the consuming popularity of these pundits. This journey through collective incertitude doesn't seek to answer any of life's pressing questions, but it sure offers an enjoyable ride.--McBroom, Kathleen Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IT'S one of our great cultural paradoxes that people hate being told what to do but love reading advice columns. Order me to tidy my work space and I'll bristle. Show me an advice column about a disheveled co-worker and I'll read it eagerly, with zero compulsion to apply its lessons to myself. Advice columns are always directed at some other slob (or jerk or wing nut). They are stages where the humble dramas of personhood play out in letters edited and condensed for clarity. They promise utility while providing, at their best, a creamy scoop of entertainment with a scant sprinkling of moral education on top. The man who invented the advice column as we know it was John Dunton, a 17th-century London bookseller and publisher who was nicknamed "the maggot" by his contemporaries, thanks to his talent for getting under people's skin. Dunton came up with the genius idea for a magazine made up of questions submitted by readers. He believed the magazine would be popular with "lovers of novelty," which is to say every human on earth. To generate questions, Dunton promised anonymity to submitters. To generate answers, he formed a committee of "experts" (some guys he knew). His magazine's first issue was published in 1691 and considered questions about the ethics of wife-beating and why there are spots on the moon. The magazine lasted six years and answered nearly 6,000 questions, many of them dirty. Jessica Weisberg begins "Asking for a Friend," her sprightly history of the advice column, with Dunton, which is apt not only because he invented the genre but because he inadvertently anticipated its next several hundred years. His magazine published answers to eternal questions like "What are clouds made of?" (water) and "How do I get a girl to like me?" (persistence). The answers he provided are dull and convoluted; decoding Dunton's prose is like untangling a set of impossibly knotted earbuds. But the answers are not the point. The point is the social appetite he intuited and the forum he created: an anonymous proto-chat room where the benighted could wonder, without judgment, whether it's O.K. to masturbate. (Absolutely not.) Weisberg finds no correlation between an advice-giver's authority and his or her popularity, which has helped me reconcile my bewilderment that the instructions for hard-boiling an egg on Gwyneth Paltrow's website Goop yield an egg of a perfection that had eluded me for decades. Nobody died and made Paltrow the egg boss, yet I can't deny the results. As Weisberg points out, there's a simple explanation for both Paltrow's authority and my resistance: Few people in the history of written advice have actually been qualified to give it. There's no Ph.D. program or certification course or license for the role. Which means that nobody is ineligible to give advice, either. Since 1691 we've lived in an age of "unqualified people with potent megaphones providing disturbing instructions on how to live." Take Ann Landers and Dear Abby. Those columns were written by a pair of twins whose parents named them Esther Pauline and Pauline Esther, which establishes off the bat that good judgment isn't hereditary. Initially the twins answered letters together under the Ann Landers name before Pauline went rogue and pitched her own advice column to The San Francisco Chronicle. That column became Dear Abby. For decades the sisters competed viciously, tracking the number of newspapers syndicating their columns and sniping publicly about one sister's nose job and the other's writing abilities. Isn't it funny to think that decades of Americans relied for behavioral guidance on a single pair of unsportsmanlike twins with inverse names? No funnier, I guess, than Benjamin Franklin dispensing wisdom in the voice of a shiftless fellow named Poor Richard whose (fictional) wife's prodding spurred him to publish "Poor Richard's Almanack." In 1732, Franklin started churning out annual editions of the book, borrowing a conventional form and stuffing it with a mixture of decree and divine silliness, all while staying in character - the "Colbert Report" of its day, maybe. Franklin told readers never to lie to their doctors or lawyers and issued the aphorism "A full Belly is the Mother of all Evil," a poetic alternative to Michael Pollan's "Eat food, mostly plants, not too much." Franklin understood that readers gobbled up advice as entertainment first and education second. He was fine with that. Humor is one way to make the medicine go down. Some advice-givers dole out punishing slaps or withering rebukes; others ladle out cups of verbal hot cocoa, reassuring and soothing. Ann Landers, it turns out, occasionally moonlighted as Don Rickies. One woman wrote to her circa 1958. seeking advice about her 2year-old daughter, whom she described as "the homeliest child I had ever seen," with protruding ears and an unsatisfactory nose. She appealed to the columnist for tips on how to face the future with optimism. "How sad that you attach so much importance to good looks," Landers clapped back. "Get some counseling, Mother. You've got a geranium in your cranium." This is the sort of wicked tidbit served up by Weisberg, who has wisely opted to present chapter-length essays on key figures of the genre rather than attempt a comprehensive history (although I don't doubt that her research was exhaustive). Her final chapter focuses on Mike King, one of the most prolific contributors on the website Quora, where anyone can ask or answer a question. Answers written by King, a retired psychologist with a cat named Chelsea Handler, have been viewed more than nine million times and address topics ranging from mental illness to pregnancy scares. He tells Weisberg that his goal is to "try to leave people with the impression that they're not stupid, even if they are." Over the span of advice history, one type of question appears without fail. It can be summarized like this: "I suspect that I am weird. What should I do about it?" An oldfashioned advice-giver like Dorothy Dix, who started writing for The New Orleans Picayune in 1895, would instruct readers on how best to conceal their weirdness. An Ann Landers might prescribe one of several paths toward normalcy. A contemporary self-help guru like Martha Beck would tell readers to quit judging themselves and embrace the weirdness. That's progress, right? Ben Franklin's Almanack was a mixture of decree and divine silliness - the 'Colbert Report' of its day. molly young is a contributing writer at The Times Magazine and the co-author, with Joana Avillez, of the book "D C-T!"
Library Journal Review
In this absorbing book, Weisberg, an award-winning writer and producer for Gimlet Media, proves that advice takes many forms and that readers respond to it in myriad ways. For example, they might faithfully listen to a favorite advice columnist or regularly consult a horoscope. Whether we seek guidance, believe that we could fashion a better response to a question posed, or are grateful we are not experiencing the dilemma described, -Weisberg suggests that, for most of us, such a forum is irresistible as it reflects America's "cultural tendency towards optimism" and the belief that all anyone needs is occasional help. This book focuses on actual advice givers, including household names such as Ann Landers, Dear Abby, and Benjamin Franklin, and others in the field, including Swiss American psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross and Joan Quigley, Nancy Reagan's astrologer. Weisberg begins by tracing the roots of advice to the dubious Athenian Society in 1690s London, and then considers how subsequent advice givers have reflected and often shaped the history of America's culture wars. VERDICT Strong writing, thorough research, and a sharp focus on various aspects of culture and history makes this ideal for all types of collections.-Penelope J.M. Klein, Fayetteville, NY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Preface | p. 1 |
Part 1 Old, Wise Men | p. 11 |
1 In Praise of the Maggot | p. 15 |
2 Politeness vs. Honesty, Part 1 | p. 27 |
3 Funny Business | p. 43 |
4 American Guru | p. 55 |
Part 2 As a Friend | p. 67 |
5 Sob Sister | p. 71 |
6 Happy Thoughts | p. 85 |
7 Everything Changes | p. 97 |
8 Indulgence Is a Virtue | p. 111 |
Part 3 Experts Among Us | p. 123 |
9 Honorary Pants | p. 127 |
10 Doctor's Orders | p. 139 |
11 Death's Best Friend | p. 155 |
12 Guide to the Stars | p. 171 |
Part 4 Advice for All, by All | p. 189 |
13 Stand by Me | p. 193 |
14 Politeness vs. Honesty, Part 2 | p. 207 |
15 How to Coach a Life Coach | p. 219 |
16 The King of Quora | p. 233 |
Conclusion | p. 247 |
Acknowledgments | p. 251 |
Notes | p. 253 |
Index | p. 289 |